Dream House as Accident
In Boston your friend Sam—who you still think of by his college nickname, Big Sam—overhears her making you cry, and acts cold and distant to her even though you just want him to pretend like he didn’t hear anything.
Dream House as Ambition
She takes you to Harvard’s campus, which you’d never seen, and you find yourself engaging in some kind of weird retrospective fantasy. When she shows you the undergraduate dining hall, which basically looks like Hogwarts, you keep thinking to yourself: Maybe I should have gone to Harvard? Maybe I should have applied? You keep thinking back to why you applied to the colleges you did, and you remember—for the first time in years—that you chose your college list almost completely at random. You wanted to go to a city and you wanted to get out of Pennsylvania; those were the only two criteria. You wish you could accurately describe the bone-deep ache of walking on that campus, the too-late realization that you’d fucked up your whole life by not having sufficient ambition. Who are you? You are nobody. You are nothing.
She takes your arm as you walk among the buildings, as if you would have belonged there, as if you belong there, like she does.
Dream House as Man vs. Nature
In New York City you visit a store that sells natural and scientific ephemera. Deer skulls in cases, petrified wood, articulated bat skeletons in bell jars, amethyst geodes as tall as a child, taxidermied mice, trilobite fossils, leather-bound birding books. There is something hypnotic about this store. You wish you could spend all day there; you wish you could spend thousands of dollars there. It reminds you of a store you used to go to as a kid—Natural Wonders, RIP—and how it always made you feel like equal parts Ellie Sattler and Lara Croft.
That night, lying next to her on a futon, you tell her about a fantasy you have:
“We have a beautiful home; the sort of home that has its own library, filled with books and the sort of things an amateur gentleman scientist would have had in his library in the nineteen-tens. And we throw a huge, lavish party, and everyone comes, and there is laughter and drinking and delicious food. I’m in a beautiful, clingy fifties swing dress, and you are in a suit and tie. At some point in the evening, when everyone is a few drinks in, you pull me into a private corner of a small room and slip your hand up my dress, murmuring into my ear what will happen when the guests have gone home. And then later, when you have kissed the last person on the cheek and locked the front door, we fumble and tumble our way toward the library, where you push me down on a lush, red divan and I unknot your tie and unbutton your shirt, and there among the bones and the books and the paintings you slide your hand up me and bite my neck and after I come I jerk you off while dead things look over us.” This fantasy springs up so fully formed it feels like it’s already happened in some past era, as if instead of creating it you’ve just plucked it out of a soup of history and consciousness.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes.”
Dream House as Stoner Comedy
It is summer in New York, and the heat is an animal that won’t climb off. You’re staying in her friend’s apartment in Crown Heights, and you and she and Val smoke a lot of weed. You have never been a pot person—you have, in fact, been a bit of a ninny when it comes to drugs; when you even say the word drugs you feel ridiculous—but you smoke because she does and she’ll be annoyed if you don’t. (“What, you think you’re better than all this?” she says once when you decline; after that, you don’t decline.) You cough and cough because you’ve never gotten used to smoke.
You get so high, by accident. So high that when you take the subway to Little Russia, to the beach there, you remember almost none of the trip aside from a few bright, distant fragments. Being in a drugstore and feeling like you were a sacrifice to the Minotaur. Hot sand. Her touching your back with cool lotion. (There are photos of the three of you, evidence of your presence there. You’re smiling, and you look unbearably soft.)
Then, it is your birthday. There is a party. You’re too high to stand up so you sit, legs splayed and head heavy, with your back against the stove. People keep coming and sitting next to you and talking, and you keep realizing, in this drifting, belated way, that they’re concerned for you. You try to explain that you’re fine, you’re fine, you’re just high, but whatever you’re actually saying, people do not seem convinced.
Val visits you on the floor, brings you pieces of cheese. You stick one in your mouth, meditate on its smooth mouthfeel and nutty sweetness. You like her so much. She is so kind and open, and you respect her fortitude. Another piece, this one salty and crumbly, so pleasant in the way it comes apart. How did you get so lucky, to have all of these new people in your life? The next piece is fresh mozzarella, and as Val helps you stand you think to yourself mozzarella is basically water cheese and then you go to another room and fall asleep.
Dream House as Meet the Parents
In the car from New York, your girlfriend is high and quiet. She reeks of weed, and is about to meet your parents for the first time. You are angrier than you’ve ever been with her. “We’re gonna meet my parents in, like, an hour. I don’t understand why you would do this.”
“You’ve never had to meet someone’s parents when you’re the first girlfriend,” she snaps. “They look at you in this way and it’s unbearable.”
You are silent.
“They won’t be able to tell,” she says.
“Now you can’t even help me drive,” you say. “I have to do this all on my own.”
You inch through New York this way, the car filled with the silent, wavy heat of your respective angers.
In Allentown, your parents are very nice to her.
Dream House as Here Comes the Bride
In DC, she meets your college friends, whose reactions to her range from sweet and excited to reserved. (Sam has gotten to them, you realize with a panic. You haven’t successfully contained the situation.)
In Virginia, you ride horses through the woods and watch the sunrise over the Shenandoah mountains. The wedding is beautiful. At the reception, you all crowd into a photobooth. You don gloves. You hold a monocle over your eye. You cock a pipe against your lips. You drink, you dance. You love the way she bops on the dance floor, the dance of someone who has joy in her body. After the wedding you have to rip her little black dress off her body because the zipper is broken and you are both drunk and stoned and laughing.
The next day, after you say good-bye to your friends, you sit in the car in the parking lot as she talks at you—your friends hate me, they’re jealous. An hour later you are still there, your head bent tearily against the window. The new bride walks by and notices you in your car. You see her slow down, her face crimped with puzzlement and concern. You shake your head ever so slightly, and she looks uncertain but mercifully she keeps walking so you can endure your punishment in peace. By the time you’ve wound out of the mountains and gotten back to a freeway, the bite of the fight has sweetened; whiskey unraveled by ice.
Dream House as House in Florida
You visit her parents’ house in the southernmost part of Florida. You fought the whole way down—at the Dulles airport she made you cry at a Sam Adams–branded restaurant and several strangers looked over with judgment as you pressed a napkin against your face like a consumptive—and you are relieved to be there.
She has an ancient cat who immediately tries to bite you. Her mother is birdlike, too thin, and you are worried—for her, for yourself. Her father shows up later, pours himself a generously sized cocktail. Her family is funny and mean. They are different from your family, who you feel have never appreciated your mind. And there is only her and her two parents and you are jealous; there is no other word for it.
They feed you. Chicken and Israeli couscous and cookies and kalamata olives and a bean salad with so much dill. Seafood and risotto and fresh fruit. You laugh. “Maybe we should move here,” you say, and her mother smiles brightly, and for a moment you feel like a scene in a movie, a boyfr
iend being plied by the culinary arts of the mother of your lover. You never see her mother eat, not once.
“If you go out for a walk later,” her father says, drinking his third martini, “make sure you watch out for alligators.”
“Alligators?” you repeat in alarm.
“They probably wouldn’t attack you,” he says. The glass is, suddenly, empty. “Probably.”
The next day, you get into a fight about almost nothing at all while sitting on her childhood bed. You decide to walk away, go sit in the kitchen. “I’ll be reading,” you say, and you do, for almost an hour. Her mother is standing at the counter, chopping something fragrant and chatting at you in a bright voice.
Your girlfriend comes into the kitchen, and asks, “What are you reading?” as her hand starts to circle your arm. “I’m—” you start to reply, and her fingers tighten.
Her mother, still chopping, says, “Are you girls still going to the beach later?” Her knife raps against the cutting board with unnerving precision.
Her grip goes hard, begins to hurt. You don’t understand; you don’t understand so profoundly your brain skitters, skips, backs up. You make a tiny gasp, the tiniest gasp you can. It is the first time she is touching you in a way that is not filled with love, and you don’t know what to do. This is not normal, this is not normal, this is not normal. Your brain is scrambling for an explanation, and it hurts more and more, and everything is static. Your thoughts are accompanied by a cramp of alarm, and you are so focused on it that you miss her response.
An hour later, you are at the beach, just the two of you. “Let’s go in the water,” she says.
You follow her in because you don’t know what else to do. The Florida ocean is like nothing you’ve ever experienced—warm as a bath but, paradoxically, full of threat. The ice-cold oceans of your girlhood seemed more hostile to life; anything could be lurking in this beautiful, tepid water. When you get out up to your necks, she says, “Let me hold you!”
You stare at her.
“Why are you so pissy?” she asks. “You’ve been like this from the moment we left the house.”
“I need to talk to you,” you say. “Earlier, when you grabbed my arm—that was so scary. You touched me and it wasn’t with concern or love. You touched me with anger.” You feel like a fucking hippie, but you don’t know what other language to put to it, the panicked tattoo of your heart. “You squeezed and squeezed and—” You lift your arm out of the water, where you have begun to bruise ever so slightly. “Why did you do that?”
Her expression is flat for a half second before her chin begins to tremble. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean it. You know I love you, right?”
The rest of the visit is uneventful, except for one night toward the end when you both come in from the pool just after sunset. You open the sliding glass door to air-conditioning and escalating voices, and as you cross the kitchen together, you see her father stepping toward her mother. He’s holding a drink, and he’s shouting about—something. She is tight against the counter. Your girlfriend keeps moving, without pause, but you stop for a beat and look at them. Her mother flashes you a glance, and then tilts her chin up toward her husband and says, “I need to finish dinner,” before turning her back to him. The moment feels fraught, but it passes and he stalks away.
In your girlfriend’s bedroom, you are shaking. Outside, the air is filled with prestorm pressure. She strips down to nothing and stands there covered in goosebumps. “I don’t want to be like him,” she says, “but sometimes I worry that I am.” It doesn’t sound like she’s talking to you.
When the storm breaks, the thunder is as loud as a gun.
Dream House as Bluebeard
Bluebeard’s greatest lie was that there was only one rule: the newest wife could do anything she wanted—anything—as long as she didn’t do that (single, arbitrary) thing; didn’t stick that tiny, inconsequential key into that tiny, inconsequential lock.14
But we all know that was just the beginning, a test. She failed (and lived to tell the tale, as I have), but even if she’d passed, even if she’d listened, there would have been some other request, a little larger, a little stranger, and if she’d kept going—kept allowing herself to be trained, like a corset fanatic pinching her waist smaller and smaller—there’d have been a scene where Bluebeard danced around with the rotting corpses of his past wives clasped in his arms, and the newest wife would have sat there mutely, suppressing growing horror, swallowing the egg of vomit that bobbed behind her breastbone. And then later, another scene, in which he did unspeakable things to the bodies (women, they’d once been women) and she just stared dead into the middle distance, seeking some mute purgatory where she could live forever.
(Some scholars believe that Bluebeard’s blue beard is a symbol of his supernatural nature; easier to accept than being brought to heel by a simple man. But isn’t that the joke? He can be simple, and he doesn’t have to be a man.)
Because she hadn’t blinked at the key and its conditions, hadn’t paused when he told her her footfalls were too heavy for his liking, hadn’t protested when he fucked her while she wept, hadn’t declined when he suggested she stop speaking, hadn’t said a word when he left bruises on her arms, hadn’t scolded him for speaking to her like she was a dog or a child, hadn’t run screaming down the path from the castle into the nearest village pleading with someone to help help help—it made logical sense that she sat there and watched him spinning around the body of wife Number Four, its decaying head flopping backward on a hinge of flesh.
This is how you are toughened, the newest wife reasoned. This is where the tenacity of love is practiced; its tensile strength, its durability. You are being tested and you are passing the test; sweet girl, sweet self, look how good you are; look how loyal, look how loved.
14. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C610 and C611, The one forbidden place (forbidden chamber).
II
The milk was so hot, she could barely let her lip touch it at first. The tiny sips spread inside her mouth and released a melange of organic flavors. The milk seemed to taste of bone and blood, of warm flesh, or hair, saltless as chalk yet alive as a growing embryo. It was hot through and through to the bottom of the cup, and Therese drank it down, as people in fairy tales drink the potion that will transform, or the unsuspecting warrior the cup that will kill.
—Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt
Dream House as Heat Death of the Universe
As long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with physical and temporal limits. The beginning, the end. The first, the last. The edge. Once, when I was a kid, I stood in that wonderful sand right at the lip of the tide—the kind that could be wet and pliable or go hard like damp cornstarch—and yelled to my parents that I was standing on the line of the map. When they didn’t understand, I explained that there was a line on the map between the land and the water, and I was on it, precisely.
Many years later I went snorkeling with my brother off the southern coast of Cuba. After dipping around the coral reefs near the shore, my brother asked our guide—a tanned, shirtless, free-diving hippie named Rollo—to take us both farther out. So we went into the open water, where if you relax your body the whole of the ocean will rock you back and forth, make you a little seasick. Rollo took us to the place where the shelf dropped off. One minute I could see the sand, and the next there was a deep, blue-black nothing. The three of us surfaced, and Rollo told me to watch him. Then he dove down and down until the darkness swallowed him up.
Even though I was safe—my back was exposed to the air and I was inches from oxygen—I gasped and lifted my face out of the water. My brother said, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” and I tried to explain but could not. A few seconds later, Rollo surfaced, grinning. “Did you see?” he asked.
A theory about the end of everything: the heat death of the universe. Entropy will take over and matter will scatter and nothing will be anymore.
Dream House as Destination
You drive to Bloomington with her, because you love her and you want to deliver her safely. You don’t trust those airplanes to remind her how much she is loved.
The Dream House looks just as you remember it. The pod full of her things has been delivered and sits in the yard like a shed. It occurs to you, when you open it, that someone could live in one of these, probably. A microapartment. Then you think about Narnia; the way Lucy enters the wardrobe and steps through those fur coats until she is in the snow, and there is the lamppost, and there is a whole new world frozen in a terrible winter by the White Witch.
You unload it under the watchful eyes of her parents, who observe as you lift her tiny frame high to untie the mattress from the ceiling. She tells you later that they looked starry-eyed to see you picking her up like that—like you were some strapping lad showing off your strength.
After you all go out to dinner, you fall into bed and cry and marvel, all at once.
Dream House as Utopia
Bloomington: even the name is a promise. (Living, unfurling, soft in your mouth.)
Dream House as Doppelgänger
When your cell phone rings in the late afternoon, you know what’s happening before you pick up. You do not believe in psychic powers, but still, you are certain.
“I need to know this is real,” she says when you pick up. “I need to know that you’re in this for real.”
“I am, I am.”
“I just broke up with Val,” she says. “It’s just—it’s just clear from what’s been happening since she moved that this won’t work between us. We’re gonna stay friends, of course, and she adores you. But she’s going to go back to the East Coast.”
In the Dream House Page 5
